(Look at dat Athens sunlight, yo. It’s blinding.)
I’m not very good at vacationing. I need to constantly be doing something or else I get restless. Since this is an intended extended vacation, I came prepared with a sketchbook and colored pencils, but I miss jumping between projects. You may ask how do I finish projects if I jump around so much? Well, I don’t; I have a slight case of crafty ADD, and a huge chunk of unfinished projects.
It goes like this. If I’m sketching, I need to take a break and sew something. If I’m sewing, I need to take a break and decoupage. If I’m decoupaging, I need to take a break and paper mache. It’s a never ending cycle, and it takes me forever to finish something I’ve started.
Being in Greece is forcing me to break out of that and really focus on finishing a project straight through. I have limited materials, so this is sort of a chance for me to fully explore some things. And it seems like my main material will be paper.
I’m lucky to have an aunt who loves decoupaging, and would decoupage everything if she could. I love decoupaging too, so she gave me the opportunity to decoupage her table. She told me to have my way with it. And I showed that table who’s boss.
My usual decoupage method is cutting and pasting text scraps as a base. I used an old Greek newspaper for this. (Don’t ask me what glue I used, because I don’t know what it is. It surely ain’t my beloved Mod Podge, which I miss so dearly.)
I love all things cherry blossoms, and so I cut out pieces of brown from magazines to build the tree. I looked for patterns, textures, and solid browns when browsing through the magazines. I didn’t have anything drawn out; I kinda just went with my gut and figured it out as I went.
It kinda looks mosaic-like with the different scraps of brown.
There was a point I had to call it quits with the tree and accept that less is more, which I also had to keep in mind for the flowers.
I didn’t want to make the flowers pink like the typical cherry blossom tree. One, I don’t think my aunt would have liked pink. Two, I wanted to change it up a bit. I started cutting out green, but I didn’t want it to look like weirdly shaped leaves, so I started throwing in a variety of blue flowers. I still feel like it needed a little something extra, so I cut pasted some purple in there too. It came out to be a nice mix of cool colors.
This was a whole day project. Start to finish, in one day. I was proud of myself for sticking through this, and it kept me busy while I was out on the balcony enjoying the nice weather. If I could decoupage all day errrrday, I’d be a happy camper.
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